Wisely, the trio’s fourth studio album, Ursa Major, isn’t so much an emulation of that bygone shtick as it is a celebration of it—a familiar, mindlessly fun ode to commercial alt-rock. Easily digested but not so easily forgotten, Ursa Major is tongue-in-cheek, candy-coated fare that thrives on the inevitability of listeners humming its contagious refrains days later, no matter how inanely predictable the tunes initially seemed. To wit, lead single “Don’t Believe a Word” is a heavy-handed political diatribe that manages to provide all sorts of readymade sing-along bliss in spite of its inherent triteness.

The formula is dependable and timeworn but ultimately successful, as Third Eye Blind follows the paint-by-numbers blueprint with stunning efficiency. The band knocks out the hummable, jangling “Bonfire,” the piano and horns-driven “One in Ten,” and “Dao of St. Paul” in calm, breezeless succession. The latter track, especially, is maddening in its ability to cloak all of Jenkins’s derivative tics with a catchy choral progression, but such is the compulsion of Ursa Major‘s seductive sound. It’s slick music for the last remaining gasps of a thoughtless summer, and a perfect foil for the rote bumbling and forced grandiosity of other similarly aged bands’ comeback offerings.